


The Rotten Heart

by Nomad (nomadicwriter)



Category: Behind You (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:29:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21640975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nomadicwriter/pseuds/Nomad
Summary: Stonetree is a town with a hell of a past. Then again, I have one of my own.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Rotten Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IncurableNecromantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncurableNecromantic/gifts).



I still don't know if the book was a threat or a warning, or maybe just an oversight. I found it shoved down in the gap between my mattress and the headboard, which didn't give me much hope that the room had been properly cleaned. But that's what you get for cheap rent in a student town.

Stonetree was a weird place. Nothing I could put my finger on, just an uneasy atmosphere. Or maybe anywhere would feel like that after escaping the family nest. It was a grim little town, old stone houses and streets that seemed to be designed to channel icy breezes like a wind tunnel. The noisy central heating in my house-share never cranked up enough to actually keep the place warm.

For the rent I was paying I figured I'd be elbow to elbow with housemates, but there was only other one room occupied, and either that guy crept in and out at the weirdest hours, or the landlord had invented him so I'd think there was someone to narc on me if I broke the house rules.

The landlord was... a landlord. Not quite a sleaze, but the kind of badly-aging font of cheeseball jokes who thinks he has the gift of old-school charm. He showed off the cheap wallpaper and leaky windows like I'd won the grand prize on a gameshow.

"I shouldn't be letting you have it for this price, but just think of me as your soft-touch Uncle Marvin," he said. "Between you and me and the ghost of Chatty Alice, I'm practically losing money on this deal, but I couldn't leave a lovely lass like you out in the cold, could I?" He even winked.

You heard a lot about Chatty Alice in Stonetree, except you didn't, actually. It was one of those unexplained references you were just supposed to recognise, like Davey Jones' locker. Near as I could tell, it was an ironic nickname, like some hulking guy down the pub being called Tiny. But who exactly was Chatty Alice?

For all that people threw her name around freely, that question wasn't easy to answer.

*

I found the book that first night when I was making the bed. It was full of pencil-written scrawl, so I figured it was lecture notes from someone's class last year, and probably irrelevant by now. I wasn't exactly eager to call Marvin back there at that time of night or, well, ever, so I checked the inside covers for a name. When I didn't find one, I tossed it in a corner to be dealt with whenever. Just one more little detail of many to sort out. Moving across the country without family help sucks.

I soon found out why I'd had no trouble getting a place at the local uni even with my decidedly patchy education history. It was almost as empty as my supposed house-share. I'd go to classes and there'd be about eight people in a lecture theatre made to seat a hundred. Maybe it was just an unpopular degree, but it felt like more than that. The campus had an after-hours feel, like I'd showed up after everybody had gone home even though it was the middle of the day.

In fact, the whole of Stonetree was like that. It could have been partly the consistently miserable weather, but the entire town felt pretty hollow. Empty shops and houses, near-deserted streets, kids playing in scraggly wastegrounds full of weeds and old building supplies.

That was the second place that I heard the name Alice, from a group of girls playing one of those clapping games that I'd always thought went out when kids got phones. But old-fashioned or not, this was a new one on me. It went:

_Little Alice went to bed,  
Hit her head, now she's dead.  
And she never will be wed  
In the morning._

_Little Alice cast a spell,  
Did it well, wouldn't tell.  
Now she's being sent to hell  
In the morning._

Cheerful, right? Not that I had room to talk. I'm pretty sure I learned one about throwing your boyfriend down the stairs. Kids have always been ghouls.

Still, it stuck with me because of the weird Chatty Alice thing from not-so-charming Marvin on my arrival.

I want to say that was the day that I finally looked at the book, but maybe I'm just thinking that because it feels fitting. Anyway, whenever, I got round to reading it. Probably because the wi-fi in that house never worked for crap, and I always used to scuttle back to my room with whatever instant snack was passing for dinner. I never quite felt comfortable lingering in the common areas, even though there was no one else around. Or _because_ there was no one else around.

So I sat down with my less-than-healthy microwave pasta thing and took a skim through the notebook. It was obvious pretty fast that it wasn't lecture notes. The first page was titled 'Theories', a bullet-point list encompassing cult recruitment, ritual sacrifice, serial killings, organised crime, and, added later in a different pen, 'supernatural???'.

Ever get the feeling that you might have picked the wrong town to do your degree?

*

I read through the rest of the notebook, but most of it was hard to make sense of, the kind of cryptic personal jottings meant to remind a writer who already knew what they were talking about: lists of dates and names without context, random notes to self like 'mirrors' and 'check for older graveyard?' Two things, though, were clear. Whatever they'd been looking for, they'd been digging into the town's history, both modern-day and from centuries back.

And that name Alice was everywhere. Birth, death and marriage dates of local Alices, going back to the 1500s. Scribbled Chatty Alice phrases and fragments of rhymes like the ones that I'd already heard. A list of seeming pseudonyms, not just Chatty Alice but Dear Alice, Maiden Alice, Little Alice Red.

Folklore, ancient history and recent events, all tangled together in a hopeless knot. It made the back of my neck itch, the same warning tingle that Stonetree gave me in general. The sense of something rotten under the surface.

Time to do some research of my own.

*

I got the crappy wi-fi up and found an overview of the town's past, which made for lovely bedtime reading. It seemed that Stonetree started out as a forest clearing on a road notorious for highwaymen, with a big old oak tree where they'd hanged the ones they caught. A gruesomely enterprising couple set up the Stonetree Inn for travellers who came to see the show.

Start as you mean to go on, apparently. As the growing size of the town drove the highwaymen away, the owners of the inn turned to poisoning their guests to steal their valuables instead. After one would-be victim survived to bring accusations, they claimed to have been bewitched, sparking a literal witch hunt that resulted in three innocent women being hanged as well. The owners got off scot free, of course.

Karma was slow off the mark, and it was a century later that the infamous old oak was struck by lightning, sparking a fire that burned the Stonetree Inn down to the ground and took half of the high street with it. Since nobody in this town's history could take a hint, they promptly built the Stonetree Industrial School for orphans on the site. It was shut down in the 1890s after a scandal involving child deaths and acts of cruelty, and became the notoriously poor-quality Stonetree Hospital. That died a slow death from multiple rounds of government cuts, much like its patients, and the building stood empty until it found new life as the replacement town hall.

The old one, I discovered, had blown up in a gas explosion, killing twelve. By that point I couldn't say I was surprised.

Any town's history would look pretty grim if you pared it down to tragedies, but this one seemed to be going for quantity over quality - and I still hadn't found an Alice anywhere among the cast. I started digging for real.

The local history shelf at the library was a bust, almost suspiciously so. You'd think they'd be milking this stuff for the tourist money. But a book on the Stonetree witches did provide one snippet that caught my attention: a reference to a chapbook that was published at the time relating the tale and 'various rhymes'. Per the bibliography, that nugget came from a 1920s book on regional folklore and children games. I ordered a copy off the internet for way too much money, because if there's one thing I inherited from my mother, it's a woeful inability to let things lie when I really should.

While I was waiting for that delivery to arrive, I hit up the archives of the _Stonetree Herald_ , armed with a list of dates from the notebook. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, and found it all the same: a rash of disappearances and bizarre deaths, going back decades. Far too many for a town this size, and yet all reported like isolated incidents, as if no one at the paper or police station had thought of joining the dots.

I mean, seriously, how many accidental impalements can you have in one small town over the years without so much as a footnote on the weird coincidence? I would have said two was pushing it, not seven.

And once you knew that was a popular cause of death around here, you started looking askance at the number of stabbings. Even given the fact that it was a student town, Stonetree hardly seemed busy enough to be a hotbed of crime. It was barely a hotbed of people. Yet there were strangulations and hangings and countless accidents, and nobody here seemed to give a damn.

Something smelled rotten - and it might just be Marvin's cologne. He was waiting to ambush me with my parcel when I got back from my two o'clock lecture at the uni. Funny time of day to be expecting me back, unless he had my timetable a bit too well memorised for my comfort.

"You got a delivery." He waved it, but didn't immediately hand it over. To my eye it would have fit through the letterbox just fine without needing anyone to be there to receive it. "Everything all right with the house?" he asked.

"Fine." Many things were not all right with the house, but none bad enough I'd voluntarily invite Marvin in to deal with them. "That must be the book that I ordered." I held out a hand for it, calling his bluff on holding it hostage.

"Always nice to meet a young person who reads," he said, handing it over with an oily smile. "I see you, scurrying back and forth to the library with all those books."

Funny, considering I didn't remember seeing Marvin anywhere in the vicinity at the time.

Call me paranoid, but I was pretty glad I'd been schlepping my research around with me to read in spare moments instead of leaving it at the house.

*

Once I was sure Marvin was gone I opened my parcel. At least there was no sign it had been tampered with, and the book that I'd ordered was inside. I turned straight to the section on the Stonetree witches, which started out feeling like a big waste of my money. A much-summarised version of what I'd read before, and the mention of the chapbook _was_ just a mention - no copies of it had survived even back when this book was written in 1923.

But then things got a bit more interesting. According to the author, said chapbook was supposed to have contained the first known copy of the rhyme Little Alice Red - something pretty curious to him and me both, since the women unjustly hanged had been a Florence, a Bridget and an Elinor, no Alice involved.

This original published rhyme, too, had been lost, but he'd done his detective work into the local tradition of Alice rhymes and dug up the oldest version still floating around. It was recognisable as the clapping rhyme the girls had been singing, but the first verse was... a bit different.

_Little Alice was shot dead,  
In the head, how she bled.  
And the stone tree will run red  
In the morning._

The second verse was mostly the same as the one I'd heard, except for one small tweak. This particular Alice wasn't being sent to hell.

She was _coming back_ from hell.

*

After my encounter with Marvin, I opted to lay low for a while. Whatever I was trying to unearth here, my investigation was clearly attracting attention from the not-so-good people of Stonetree - which didn't exactly encourage me to stop. Yeah, I'm stubborn and contrary, but more than that, I had an ugly feeling this wasn't a time when staying ignorant would be very blissful.

Still, with only disconnected pieces of the puzzle, it seemed like a good time to throw off some suspicion and by acting more like a typical student. I assumed that involved finding a party to stay out late at. You'd have thought Stonetree's oddly low population would have made that difficult, but instead it seemed to induce a sense of desperation to be Having A Good Time. Like whistling past the graveyard, but with more cheap booze and thumping bass.

If that youth of today that Marvin thinks don't read are into thumping bass. Technically I've got the youth, but my upbringing was kind of short on the today. Luckily, it's not hard to get in through the door where there's cheap booze and desperation, and I can stand in a corner holding a crappy beer with the best of them.

And funnily enough, that was where I learned how to find Alice.

In the student union toilets, to be exact, which admittedly is up there as far as grim locations go. As I was coming out, there were two girls in front of the mirror, one of them trying to shake a shaggy bleached hairdo into something tidier. "Oh, God, I look like Chatty Alice," she said. Her mate gave the sort of too-loud cackle people do when someone's said something that's more outrageous than funny.

"What's that you say?" I asked. Okay, butting into a strangers' conversation in a toilet isn't subtle, but drunk people are pretty chill towards social etiquette. Or maybe they were just dying to spread the local urban legend to anyone who hadn't heard it yet.

They and a few local friends convened in a suitably spooky and ill-lit corner to share the tale with me and what other impressionable out-of-towners they managed to draw in.

"She's the ghost of a servant girl who was killed by the witches after she spied on one of their rituals," said the one with the bleach job, Sarah.

"No, she _is_ a witch," her friend Megan corrected. "She was cursed after she let the other women be hanged in her name."

Someone else had heard she'd been killed by her fiancé the night before their wedding, after he found out her brother was the highwayman who'd murdered his father, or possibly the other way around. Or maybe she'd been the daughter of the murderous innkeepers who'd known about their crimes and said nothing.

But one thing everybody definitely agreed on was that Chatty Alice had known some kind of terrible secret that she'd never told - and now she could be summoned to tell dark truths by anybody brave and stupid enough to try.

"You need to have a mirror on the wall in a dark room, and another mirror in your hands," Sarah told us. "You've always got to keep your back to the one on the wall, and _only_ look at her behind you through the hand mirror. And then you say the words to call her up."

There were shudders from the group of hangers-on as she and the other locals chanted the ritual words, almost gleefully.

" _Alice, what's your secret?  
Alice, won't you tell?  
Alice, time to come back  
Through the gates of hell!_"

It was pure cheese, but all the same, one girl shrieked as Sarah flung her arms out wide on the last word. She and Megan promptly collapsed into laughter. A few people looked around nervously, and even I felt the back of my neck prickle, that sensation like someone looking over your shoulder.

As if someone or something had suddenly started paying attention.

"So what happens when she appears?" I was the one to ask.

"She comes out of the mirror behind you," Megan said in hushed tones, "and no matter what you do, you can't turn round or she'll get you. You can ask her questions, but if she starts to show her face, you have to throw the mirror down and smash it right away or she'll drag you down to hell with her."

The conversation turned to posturing about who was totally not scared of doing the ritual and what someone's cousin's school friend or whoever had supposedly seen when they'd tried it. I didn't think I was getting any more useful information here.

"Gotta..." I stood up and gestured vaguely in the direction other people had been going off to smoke.

But that wasn't where I was headed, and I wasn't going home, either. My access card still let me into the other buildings after hours, and considering how deserted the uni was even during the day, I was betting it wouldn't be hard to find a rarely-trafficked set of toilets with a suitable mirror. Rule one, never summon a potentially malevolent entity in your own home.

Rule zero, of course, is never do it at all, but I wanted some answers.

Time to see if Chatty Alice was feeling chatty.

*

It was a chill night with a full moon, which seemed auspicious for a summoning. I found myself a run-down building at the far side of campus and a set of toilets that didn't look like anyone had been in there for years, least of all the cleaners. But there was a grimy mirror that would suit my purposes, and I had the little square one that I carried in my bag.

Two other things I did before I started. One, prop the door to facilitate a hasty getaway. And two, draw a circle of protection out around my feet. My mother didn't raise any fools - but she did raise a few other things. I'd come to Stonetree to get away from the family business of bothering the dead, but the real curse I'd inherited was too much curiosity for my own good.

I angled my little mirror to see the one behind me, and spoke the ritual words the locals had given me.

Nothing happened at first, but I kept my patience and held still. The mirror's surface behind me was dark. With only the light from outside of the room shining in, I could make out the back of my head, but the open stall door I was facing might as well have just been a black hole.

Or a long dark tunnel - with a pale shape approaching from the distant end. Chatty Alice had arrived. She was indistinct, blurred by smeared glass and the glare from the hallway lights, but something about her outline made me think of an old-fashioned child's doll. It took me a moment to realise that it wasn't just the vague impression I got of a ragged dress and white apron: it was the way her feet dangled below her without touching the ground.

Not really a woman at all, but something unseen dragging the shape of one around like a puppet.

" _Who calls me?_ " she said, though I couldn't make out features to know if her mouth moved. The voice was hoarse and raw, and seemed to come from every direction at once.

"I do," I said. I wasn't planning on giving any personal details away. No way to know what rules I was playing by, but it was never smart to offer anything freely.

" _Speak,_ " she said. Chatty, all right.

And still getting closer. Her arms were up in front of her face, I saw now. Covering her eyes? Or... holding something? I couldn't see too clearly in the murk and the distortion of the double reflection, and the itch to turn and look was dangerously strong.

As for what to ask her, well, there was the obvious. "What's your secret, Alice?" I said.

" _Everyone's secrets._ "

Talking in circles. But she was growing clearer now, like she was right on the other side of the big mirror. Her hands were up in front of her eyes as I'd seen, but not just held there - they were pinned in place by arrows skewered through the palms. Feathered shafts stuck out all over her body like pins jabbed into a voodoo doll; very like, since there were no wounds and no blood.

I had a feeling I was running out of time to ask questions. The room was growing colder by the moment, my breath a visible puff that threatened to fog the mirror in my hands. I was glad I'd kept my hat and gloves on: I didn't want it slipping from my numb fingers.

But asking Alice for her name and story felt like the wrong move now. Somehow I suspected she had as many of those as I'd heard versions told.

Instead, I went for the more direct version. "Who are you, Alice?"

" _Stonetree._ " She started to pull her hands down from her face, the first evidence of blood gushing from the arrow wounds through her palms.

I didn't wait to see what was revealed, just threw the hand mirror straight to the floor. It hit the tiled floor of the stall in front of me and shattered explosively, like sheet ice.

And maybe that would have been the end of it right there - if a chunk of the mirror hadn't rebounded back to cut right through the line of my magic circle.

Guess that seven years of bad luck kicks in fast.

"Shit!" I snatched the broken piece up as I bolted for the door, but it was too late to restore power to the circle. I was tempted to use the mirror to see over my shoulder, but that temptation would just get me dead. A broken shard wouldn't be enough to keep Alice contained.

I needed to find some other way of doing that, and fast. Smashing the mirror should have banished her, but I'd outsmarted myself when I drew that circle. What was meant to be double protection had only given her another route to break in by. And the "don't look round" rule couldn't save me forever.

As I left the building, a pale flash of motion across campus caught my eye. I almost turned to look by reflex before I registered that it was a reflection in the windows of the arts building. Chatty Alice was right on my tail.

I didn't run, but I kept up a rapid walk, talking the less-used footpath behind the buildings. Stopping would be bad, turning would be worse, and fleeing wouldn't help me get away. I desperately tried to think.

Any hopes of learning the ghost's tale and laying her to rest had fizzled out. The list of Alice names in the notebook hadn't led me anywhere. Even if there had been a real Alice once, this creature wasn't her: Chatty Alice was no more than a convenient shape, an urban legend to give a face to something bigger.

And that was a problem. You could exorcise a dead woman; you couldn't exorcise a town. Alice was all the badness that had happened here in Stonetree given form. How did you fight that?

With a symbol. As I emerged onto the high street, the great Victorian bulk of Stonetree town hall loomed ahead. My throat felt thick, like I was struggling to breathe, and I wasn't so sure it was just my nerves. Somewhere near the town hall was the literal root of things - the site of the one-time hanging tree. It might be paved over and hemmed in on all sides, but I was sure something of it would survive.

It had better, because if I hit a dead end once I was inside the grounds, there was no way to back out without turning to face Alice.

The building was surrounded by a high wrought iron fence, but the rusty gates were left standing open. No surprise: Stonetree that kind of place, a town where signs went missing and safety ropes came loose. Accidents just waiting to happen.

One of them was trying to happen to me. As I shouldered through the gate, Alice's presence felt heavier on me, like a smothering blanket dipped in ice water. There was an uncomfortable pressure at my neck, like my scarf had slipped down low and pulled back enough to choke. I went to tug it loose and damn near slashed my throat with the mirror shard I'd forgotten I still had in my hand.

I almost tossed it down before I made a worse mistake, but right now it was the only tool I had. I didn't think I'd get time to rummage in my bag. As I cut around the corner past the town hall's tall, a pale shape flashed through each individual pane of glass. It seemed to be more substantial, less ghostly than before. I almost turned to look, but wrenched my head back just in time. The scarf drew tighter, feeling like a solid knot around my throat. I was afraid to yank at it in case it tightened more instead of pulling loose.

But there, an archway through to a courtyard. Dark as hell with the streetlights blocked by the buildings, but there was no choice left. Alice was right behind me now. I felt sharp, feathery jabs poking me in the back, like the fletched ends of arrows. I grimaced at imagined visions of them driven deeper in by the impact, bloodless wounds beginning to run red. Making me a party to the crime, a long ago gruesome murder that might never have happened - but that didn't matter when it stood for all the ones that had.

The dark space in between the buildings reeked. Dumpsters, I might have thought if I'd let my rational mind take the wheel, but I knew better. It was the foul stench of corpse rot. In the pale light of the full moon, I saw shadows flap above. It could have been a loose tarpaulin from some building work, but to me it looked more like a ragged coat. There a pallid shape that could have been a dangling hand, there the thin line of the hanging rope-

_Shit._ I didn't see how I tripped, just knew that I was falling forward. My hands flew up to take the brunt of the impact, driving the mirror shard right through my glove into my palm. Cold thickened around me, and I cracked my knee on a half-buried rock as I tried to scramble back up.

And realised what I'd just tripped on: the sprawling roots of a huge tree stump. I'd found the rotting heart of old Stonetree.

It was too dark to make out the stone I'd whacked my knee against: an altar, a gravestone, a memorial? It had probably played all of those roles in the town's folklore. Stories that fed reality until they became truth, dumb kids re-enacting the urban legends and becoming the grim deaths that fuelled the new tales. There's a point, maybe, where a place becomes too poisoned to rescue, where so much has gone bad that everything that follows just reinforces the curse.

Alice wasn't a girl and this wasn't her grave, but it was the place where things began, and that made it a place where things could end. I jabbed the bloody mirror shard into the stump, driving it into the rotten wood, and yelled the best reversal I could of the ritual words.

_"Alice, keep your secret!  
Alice, never tell!  
Alice, time to go back  
Through the gates of hell!"_

I felt the cold of Alice's spirit rip through me. For a moment I was sure my clumsily improvised banishment had gone lethally wrong, but then she tore on past, pouring down into the mirror in a twisting, changing whirlwind of partly-glimpsed shapes. The arrow-riddled girl, a strangling corpse, flickering flames...

This was no time to stick around and see if she would stay contained. I bolted and I didn't stop moving until I was safely back at my crappy little place.

And I covered the mirrors, just in case.

*

I packed my stuff that night. It wasn't wise to stick around in Stonetree; I hadn't exorcised anything but my own curiosity, and I had a feeling that Marvin and co. might come after me whether Alice did or not. The darkness at the heart of the town found a way to get what it wanted by one route or another, and every time it succeeded that just made it stronger.

This was too big a haunting, too much a part of the fabric of the town by now to be cut out and still leave anything healthy behind. It would die when Stonetree did, perhaps when it one day got swallowed up by some metropolis to become no more than street names and historical footnotes.

But not soon enough to keep me safe. I should have known better than to believe I could escape from dealings with the dead just by walking away from the family business. Like Stonetree, it was too deep in the DNA to be sliced out without leaving a scar. It probably wasn't sheer bad luck I'd been drawn to this place... and I definitely couldn't blame anyone else for how fast I'd started digging up things better left buried.

I could scrape together my thin resources and try again somewhere else, but I doubted I'd get much better result. I might as well just give up and head back to my parents. After all, home is the place where, if you go there, they have to take you in - and more importantly, the place where there are people who might know what to do if the spirit of a corrupted town follows you back.

And if my time in Stonetree had taught me anything, it was that there were worse places to live.


End file.
